Links:

Celtic+: Seed4C (2012-2015)

From Security in the cloud to security of the cloud. The value
proposition of secure elements to protect software execution on a
personal computer or on a server is not to be demonstrated. Nowadays,
the emergence of cloud computing has led to a growing number of use
case scenarios where one has to deal, not with a single computer but
rather with a group of connected computers. In this case the challenge
is not only to secure the software running on one single machine, but
rather to manage and guarantee the security of a group of computers
seen as a single entity. The main idea is to evolve from a security in
the cloud (with isolated point of enforcement for security, the state
of the art) to security of the cloud (with cooperative point of
enforcement for security( the innovation proposed by this project)
This project value proposition of cooperative points of enforcement of
security is proposed under the concept of Network of Secure elements
(NoSES). NoSES are made of individual secure elements attached to
computers, user or network appliances and possibly pre-provisioned
with initial secret keys. They can establish security associations,
communicate together to setup a trusted network of computers and
propagate security conditions centrally defined to a group of
machines. The range of use cases use cases addressed by this concept
is very broad; NoSES can be used to lock the execution of software to
a group of specific machines, a particular application of this
pertaining to tying virtual machines execution to specific
servers. NoSEs can also be used to improve the security of distributed
computing, not only by making sure that only trusted nodes can take
part of the computing game, but also by certifying the integrity of
the results returned by each one of them. Secure elements located in
user appliances (such as a mobile handset) featuring a user interface
can be part of NOSE and help secure server side operations using 2
factor authentication. The project will study the impact of NoSES upon
the different layers of the architecture, from hardware to service in
order to define how the trust can be propagated from the lower layers
to the upper ones. At the lower level, the form factor and physical
interfaces of secure elements to the host will be studied as well as,
the management of their life cycle. At an upper level, the definition
and implementation of security and access control and privacy policies
involving the secure elements will be specified, as well as the
middleware solutions to interface to the corresponding functional
blocks. Finally, an important part of the project will focus on
specific use cases including those mentioned above, and where the use
of NoSEs can provide interesting solutions. One particular aspect will
address privacy and identity management

ANR SEGI: SPADES (2009-2012)

08-ANR-SEGI-025

Today's emergence of Petascale architectures and evolutions of both research grids and computational grids increase a lot the number of potential resources. However, existing infrastructures and access rules do not allow to fully take advantage of these resources.

One key idea of the SPADES project is to propose a non-intrusive but highly dynamic environment able to take advantages to available resources without disturbing their native use. In other words, the SPADES vision is to adapt the desktop grid paradigm by replacing users at the edge of the Internet by volatile resources. These volatile resources are in fact submitted via batch schedulers to reservation mechanisms which are limited in time or susceptible to preemption (best-effort mode).

One of the priorities of SPADES is to support platforms at a very large scale. Petascale environments are in consequence particularly considered. Nevertheless, these next-generation architectures still suffer from a lack of expertise for an accurate and relevant use.

One of the SPADES goal is to show how to take advantage of the power of such architectures. Another challenge of SPADES is to provide a software solution for a service discovery system able to face a highly dynamic platform. This system will be deployed over volatile nodes and thus must tolerate "failures". The implementation of such an experimental development leads to the need for an interface with batch submission systems able to make reservations in a transparent manner for users, but also to be able to communicate with these batch systems in order to get the information required by our schedulers.

SPADES will propose solutions for the management of distributed schedulers in Desktop Computing environments, coping with a co-scheduling framework.

ANR MDCA: GWENDIA (2007-2009)

Flow management is a very active research area which received
special intention from the distributed computing community over the
last years. In many scientific areas, such as the application areas
considered in this project, complex data processing procedures are
needed to analyse huge amounts of data. GWENDIA aims at providing
efficient workflow management systems to handle and process large
amounts of scientific data on large scale distributed infrastructures
such as grids. This is a multi-disciplinary project which gathers
researchers in computer science (distributed systems, scheduling) and
researchers in the life sciences community (medical image analysis,
drug discovery). The project objectives are twofold. In computer
science, GWENDIA aims at efficiently exploiting distributed
infrastructures to deal with the huge and still increasing amount of
scientific data acquired in radiology and biology centres. In
particular, we will focus on the representation and the management of
large data flows in acceptable time for the operators using
distributed resources. In life sciences area, GWENDIA aims at dealing
with distributed, heterogeneous, and evolving large scale databases,
to represent complex data analysis procedures taking into account the
medical or biological context, and to exploit CS tools to design at a
low cost scientifically challengig experiments with a real impact for
the community. This study will be based on two very large scale grid
infrastructures: the Grid'5000 French national research infrastructure
and the EGEE European production infrastructure.

GWENDIA will provide a workflow description framework including data composition operators useful for describing the applications data flows. It includes the design of workflow scheduling algorithms optimized for efficiently distributing the computation loads over a grid infrastructure, taking into account the data constraints. The scheduling strategies developed will be implemented, reusing existing software components such as the DIET middleware and the MOTEUR workflow manager. This research will be guided by the requirements of two application areas in life sciences: medical image analysis and in silico drug discovery. Concrete usecases will be implemented and deployed on grid infrastructure in both areas. The GWENDIA project aim at enabling scientific production in both areas, providing transparent access to grid infrastructures for coherently and efficiently processing these data-intensive applications.

This research project is not directly involving industries. Yet, workflow management has been a very active area for industry over the past year and with the industry uptake in grid technologies, there will probably be a significant interest from industry for grid-enabled workflow managers. In particular, INRIA/GRAAL is collaborating with IBM which is one of the major developer of the BPEL workflow language. The two application areas considered also have concrete social and industrial benefits. Automated medical imaging analysis is increasingly needed in clinics and in silico drug discovery is likely to have a huge economical impact, raising a high interest in pharmaceutics industry.

ANR CIGC : LEGO (2005-2009)

The aim of this french project is to provide algorithmic and software solutions for large scale architectures; our focus is on performance issues. The software component provides a flexible programming model where resource management issues and performance optimizations are handled by the implementation. On the other hand, current component technology does not provide adequate data management facilities, needed for large data in widely distributed platforms, and does not deal efficiently with dynamic behaviors. We choose three applications ocean-atmosphere numerical simulation, cosmology simulation, and sparse matrix solver. We propose to study the following topics: Parallel software component programming; Data sharing model; Network-based data migration solution; Co-scheduling of CPU, data movement and I/O bandwidth; High-perf. network support. The Grid’5000 platform provides the ideal environment for testing and validation of our approaches

ACI GRID : GridASP

The aim of this project is to validate a NES (Network Enabled Servers) architecture on French grid with a set of applications. Different applications in chemistry, physical, electronic and in geology. This project leans on VTHD (and VTHD++) project and “le centre Charles-Hermite” for the hardware technology and is based on GASP for the software technology.

RNTL GASP

The aim of this project is to develop the software technology dedicated to application used in an ASP (Application Service Provider) environment on the grid. The main idea of GASP is to integrate industrial applications in according to our another projects (ACI, DIET, etc.).

ACI TLSE

This project aims at setting up a Web expert site for sparse matrices, including software and a database. Using the DIET approach, this project will allow users to submit requests of expertise for the solution of sparse linear systems. For example a typical request could be “which sparse matrix reordering heuristic leads to the smallest number of operations for my matrix ?”, or “which software is the most robust for this test problem ?” The project members also include ENSEEIHT-IRIT (coordinator, Toulouse, France), CERFACS (Toulouse, France) and LABRI (Bordeaux, France).

Grid'5000

This project aims at building an experimental Grid platform gathering 8 sites geographically distributed in France. The main purpose of this platform is to serve as an experimental testbed for research in Grid Computing. This project is one initiative of the French ACI Grid Incentive

Grid’5000 is a research effort developping a large scale nation wide infrastructure for Grid research. 10 laboratories are involved, nation wide, in the objective of providing the community of Grid researchers a testbed allowing experiments in all the software layers between the network protocols up to the applications.

This high collaborative research effort is funded by the French ministry of Education and Research, INRIA, CNRS, the Universities of all sites and some regional councils.